191–200 of 262 posts
The Scheme programming language. As close to the core essence of programming as an actually usable, practical programming language has ever come. LLVM. Being able to fully represent general code in a simple, well-defined, readable text-based format is a far bigger achievement than you would think until you look at what it took to do it.
Knuth's TeX. Set the standards for documentation, reliability, portability, typography, extensibility and scripting, is well into its fourth decade and is free software.
Making a document description language purposefully turing complete is an offence that should be punishable by lashes with a fiberoptic cable.
Varnish cache. 1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it! 2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what shoul…
Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard. For example, I'd rather see a beautiful implementation of a concurrent garbage collector (which probably doesn't exist because it is almost impossible to achieve; a purely functional programming approach doesn't even apply here). Or how about a beautiful implementation of a web browser?
Peter Norvig's sudoku solver is beautiful on all levels. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html It's clearly explained code that's shorter than you would have thought. Norvig showcases his expertise in manipulating both the basic data structure of the Python language, and a deep understanding of the underlying problem and methods for solving it.
It's very rare in a programming language that I can click through to the implementation of a function and actually understand the code I get through the wall of error checking and coercion and OOP gobbledygook to even make sense of what I'm looking at.
But I've never had this problem in Haskell or Clojure. Haskell because that awesome type system makes most of that boilerplate unnecessary, and Clojure because for good or ill, the priority seems to be on clarity of code and letting the Java type system kind of catch a lot of the obvious errors.
Racket, on the other hand, much as I love it, when I go looking at it's internals most of the time it's practically unintelligible to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways." Doesn't sound like my idea of beautiful software.
I completely agree. It sounds like the opposite of beautiful software if you ask me. Maybe it's interesting, thought-provoking, or amusing code, but not beautiful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3235888/
It's funny to read what people think are beautiful apps here. IMHO, the most beautiful software are always games and entertainment titles... After all that is the purpose. Office 2013? It's very useful! I use a classic menu template and got rid of the ribbon, since the functionality is the same, but in my preferred format. Beauty does not come into play with office... I can use it for creating beautiful PowerPoint an…
This is not true. You may not value beauty as a characteristic of code, but there are people who do.
Also, you could say the same thing about novels. "concise, well-written and formatted well" are features of most published novels; does it mean they all are the same in terms of beauty?
Beauty is inherently subjective and relative. Personally, I find the code which form and function fit together pretty. It's the same kind of beauty I feel when reading poems. You're free to ignore such things, of course, but saying that the code can never be pretty is actually quite a bit rude to some people.